Phuket not surveyed, but Bangkok now ranked as world’s 2nd cheapest city

PHUKET: In what can only be good news for Phuket and the Thai tourism industry, Bangkok appears as the second most affordable city in the world, according to a list compiled and published by PriceRunner.com yesterday.

Oslo tops the list of the world’s most expensive cities, and each of the Scandinavian capitals appears in the top seven.

According to a report from ScandAsia.com, the Norwegian capital was the most expensive of the 32 cities reviewed in PriceRunner’s ‘International Price Comparison Survey’, topping the list for the fourth year running.

The survey found that prices in Oslo were a third more expensive than the global average.

Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen took places 4, 6 and 7, respectively.

Meanwhile, Bangkok came in at number 31, outdone only by Mumbai where prices were 27% lower than the global average.

The survey looked at a range of products that included everyday items such as milk and petrol as well as luxury items and technology.

For the Phuket Gazette forum posters who daily bemoan the high cost of living in Thailand, we present the following euro-prices for staples cited in the survey for selected European cities:

– a can of Coke: €2.10 (84 baht)
– a liter of milk: €1.82 (72 baht)
– a Big Mac: €5.49 (218 baht)

Here’s the list of cities, with the percentages indicating the margin above or (-below) world average prices:

Ranking / City / Margin

1 Oslo 35.3%
2 Sao Paulo 27.1%
3 Sydney 20.5%
4 Stockholm 15.5%
5 Reykjavik 14.9%
6 Helsinki 11.5%
7 Copenhagen 10.6%
8 Tokyo 9.8%
9 Paris 8.3%
10 Rome 4.4%
11 Dublin 2.0%
12 Cape Town 1.6%
13 Amsterdam 0.5%
14 Brussels -0.1%
15 Vienna -0.2%
16 Athens -0.4%
17 London -0.9%
18 Madrid -1.2%
19 Lisbon -1.2%
20 Buenos Aires -3.0%
21 Moscow -4.8%
22 Budapest -6.1%
23 Berlin -6.7%
24 Warsaw -7.8%
25 Prague -8.1%
26 Vilnius -13.3%
27 New York -14.5%
28 Shanghai -14.8%
29 San Francisco -16.2%
30 Dubai -16.2%
31 Bangkok -19.8%
32 Mumbai -26.9%

— Gazette Editors